


Reaching Through the Veil

by spinsterclaire



Series: For Imagine Claire and Jamie [7]
Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: One Shot, Prompt Fic, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-13 01:18:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5689069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spinsterclaire/pseuds/spinsterclaire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Imagine that Jamie somehow travels to Claire's time when Bree is still a baby and drops in on Claire randomly like she does in Voyager.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reaching Through the Veil

He had been there for days, and she hadn’t noticed. Sitting at the dinner table, pacing the front stoop, standing rigid against the birch tree. He’d rattled windows and overturned chairs, a bonafide paranormal disturbance in the quiet house on Burley Street. But still Claire’s eyes had remained averted, ears deaf to the slamming doors and fervent pleas. Demands of work and domestic life left no room for suspicion, and she’d carried on, painfully oblivious.

“Sassenach,” Jamie said one morning, hoping to stir her to recognition. “ _Claire_.” But his words merely fell to the floor like ash, swept away by the veil of time. Only once did he see her pause in the doorway and look cautiously over her shoulder.

“Hello?” she asked, voice fearful.

She left before the air stirred, whispering a name:

 _Sorcha_.

**~**

He’d resorted to small hints since, sprinkling the home with traces of his presence in hopes of breaching the great divide. Lost keys returned to their hooks beside the entrance; a lone glove reunited with its match. Claire nearly burned the kitchen down this Sunday past, cooing over Brianna as the stove had choked with smoke. But Jamie was there then, too, preventing fires and spills whenever Claire’s back was turned.

Crises averted but never acknowledged.

**~**

Overcome by frustration, Jamie’s ghostly hospitality turned its attentions elsewhere. Jokes at the expense of the unassuming might be a cruel game, but Jamie felt increasingly spiteful – infuriated by, even – of the man Randall. Unassuming Frank might be, Jamie thought, but not entirely innocent. For with Jamie’s invisibility, came discovery, and he gained a hawk’s eye view into a world behind drawn curtains and fogged windows.

Jamie had seen the women’s faces. Each one looked much like the last, draped in headscarves or shielded by hat brims for the sake of discretion. He’d heard their names spoken earnestly into the telephone. He’d found their lips, glaringly scarlet, on shirt collars.

“Claire,” Frank asked one evening, “have you seen my toothbru— ”

A man of genteel words, even Frank Randall had muttered a passionate _fuck_  at the discovery of his toothbrush floating inexplicably in the toilet. A frivolous punishment to be sure, but Jamie had hoped the whores would doff their scarves and shrink away from Frank’s kisses the following morning.

“Did you find it, darling?” Claire called from the bedroom. ( _Darling_. How Jamie hated the word.)

“I did,” Frank replied. “In the toilet, oddly enough.”

Jamie snickered into his palm, pleased with his delinquency. But the sweetness of revenge sours quickly with no accomplice to share it with – and his anger compounded, watching the scene:

Frank climbed into bed beside his wife, a nasty bitterness churning Jamie’s gut with more force than that godforsaken word,  _Darling_. He cursed in Gaelic, spinning on his heel and tearing like a storm through the bathroom. He ran Frank’s new toothbrush across the floor, used it to scrub every trace of grime until the tiles gleamed a virgin’s white. He set it on the sink and went in search of the liquor cabinet,  _Darling_  stalking him like a shade.  

**~**

“Can ye hear me, lass?” Jamie asked Claire one afternoon. She sat curled in an armchair, two medical journals lying open in her lap. Jamie scanned the pages and puzzled out the foreign jargon on his tongue. “‘Fasciculation’,” he read aloud. “Is that how ye say it? I dinna ken what that is, Sassenach, but I dinna have to be a doctor to recognize a nasty wee thing when I see it.”

But jokes fall flat when the audience does not hear them, and Jamie fell to his knees in defeat.

“I canna stay here much longer, Claire,” he whispered, watching her through tears.

**~**

An existence between two worlds is a precarious thing, and Jamie could feel his grasp on the 20th century beginning to weaken. With the quickening of his pulse, surroundings would flicker and fade, sand seeping through open fingers. His vision blurred and short distances grew suddenly long, with shadows sprouting where there once were none. Sounds traveled through a muggy haze, as if trapped behind glass.

It was the sound of his daughter’s cry that now brought him to his feet, racing up the stairs as if the breath of God were pushing him there. The noise echoed strangely down the hall – faint then deafening, distant then close – and soon the scents of mud and rain were bleeding through the walls.

 _Not yet_ , he thought,  _Dinna leave me now._

He stumbled into Brianna’s room, dizzy from the assault of past consuming present. Bree peered through the bars of her crib, cries abandoned in friendly welcome. Jamie looked up and found the world had steadied, though his breathing still came hard and fast.

“Ah,  _a nighean_ ,” he sighed. “There ye are.”

He advanced slowly, eyes locked on the curve of her cheek. Stars and atoms swirled unseen, restoring the crumbled walls and cracked floor to their former wholeness.

“Would ye mind if I held ye, lass?” Jamie asked, desperate for anchorage in the chaos.

“Eeee!” she replied, hands beckoning.

Jamie jumped, bewildered.

“You can hear me then?” he asked. Relief surfaced in a burst of bubbling laughter. “And see me too?”

Brianna repeated her gurgling. Shocks of red framed the cat’s eyes taking careful observation of his movements, and Jamie blossomed beneath the acknowledgement. Recognition given not just through sight and sound – but in the echo of his daughter’s blood.

A Fraser beyond just physical appearance, the child’s patience grew short. She urged him forward with a piercing screech.

“Ach! Dinna fuss about like that! Ye’ll wake yer mother.” Heedless of his advice, Bree squawked loudly into his ear.

“ _Marbhphaisg ort_! Do ye mean to deafen me first, ye wee  _bansidhe_? Ye’ve a fine set of lungs,  _a leannan_ , but ye must learn when to use them.”

Holding her now, he inhaled the scent of her: fresh shampoo, baby powder, the sickly-sweet tang of baby spit-up.

“Ordering a man to stay away – now  _that’s_  a bonnie time to scream and wail, aye? Vile creatures, men are.” He smiled into her forehead. “And none of us worthy of ye.”

“Eeee!” Bree concurred, louder now and fingers tangling themselves in Jamie’s hair. He extricated one sticky hand, and set her down in the crib.

“I mean it, lass. Have ye no’ seen yer mother when she wakes?” He pulled back, bugging his eyes and waggling his fingers. “Practically ghoulish! Her hair sticks out like a bunch o’ snakes s-s-s-s-slithering all over the place!” He tickled Bree’s belly, unable to resist provoking her further. She squealed.    

“Brianna?” a voice called suddenly – and there was that flickering again. Jamie felt the earth suddenly shift, groaning and buckling beneath his weight as the room itself blurred out of focus. Though his daughter’s face stood just inches from his own, a mile seemed to stretch between them.

 _Calm down, ye fool_. Jamie closed his eyes in concentration.  _Not yet,_ he begged again,  _Dinna leave me now._

“Brianna?” Claire called a second time, rounding the corner and entering the nursery.

Jamie’s breathing stopped at the sight of her. With sleepy eyes and rosy cheeks, Claire looked just as he’d imagined. But she wore no crown of snakes tonight – a halo, rather, bright and gleaming in the moonlight. Brown curls floated out and around her face like angels’ breath in an empty churchyard. The world righted itself once more, finding its balance in the shape of her hips.

“Sweetheart, what’s the matter?” Claire asked gently, lifting their daughter out of the crib. Expecting the grumpy resistance of a restless child, Claire laughed in surprise at Brianna’s smile.

“Happy, are we? This late in the evening?  _Surely_  you’re not my daughter.”

The nursery fell silent as Brianna calmed beneath Claire’s hands. Rocked at last into a peaceful slumber, her breathing eased into a faint and melodious whistle.

“Ye make a bonnie mother, Sassenach.” Jamie said finally. He thought of her in Paris, rounded and full and softened by pregnancy.

“You used to wake me in the night, half scairt to death that ye couldna care for a bairn.” His fingers tapped a prayer against his thigh. ( _A Dhia, let her hear me._ )“Do ye remember that,  _a ghràidh_?”

Closer now, his breath tickled the nape of her neck; a ghost’s kiss. Claire shivered, goosebumps rising as memory moved something deep within her.

Sensing his presence, she whirled to greet her visitor. Brianna wriggled against Claire’s chest, pudgy fingers come to life and greedy for a fistful of curls. Victorious, her bleary eyes grew suddenly wide and she yanked Claire’s hair like the reins of a horse.

“S-s-s-s-s-s!”

Jamie smiled, addressing Brianna over his wife’s shoulder. “I told ye so,” he said. “But she’s much prettier than a ghoul, no? Nicer, too.”

Claire startled once more and scanned the room with frightened eyes. “Hello?” she said, “Is someone there?”

Jamie’s heart slammed against his ribs and he reached out a tentative hand.

“ _Mo chridhe_ ,” Jamie whispered, “Can ye—”

“Hello?” Claire panicked again, eyes mirroring her daughter’s widened gaze. They darted around the nursery, looking beside him, above him, and through him – but frustratingly unseeing.

“Lass, I ken ye canna see me…” The image of his wife began to dim, skin turning to a milky haze as color was leached from the world. Whites and greys and the deepest blacks swirled like wraiths around their heads.

Jamie rushed towards her, aching and desperate.

 _Dhia_ ,  _dinna leave me now._

“Every day I have been here, Claire. Waiting for you and watching you. I saw you sing to yerself yesterday morning, and I saw you nurse the bairn when she couldna sleep.” His limbs tingled, nerves pulled apart and reshaped by an invisible force. “I’ve seen you cry and I’ve seen you laugh; I’ve seen you kiss another man…and lie beside him too.”

“But then there are the things I canna do,  _a ghràidh_. I canna kiss you even when the wanting of ye brings me to my knees. I canna hold you and I canna bed ye when I feel as though I’ve no body of my own.” He could barely speak, grief crashing like waves and leaving him gasping. “For I know that if I do…Claire…” His voice broke. I willna have the strength to let ye go.”

His wife stood motionless, ears tuned to the air around her. Confusion and hope played across her face, and she stepped forward.

“But I came for ye, Sassenach,” Jamie continued. “As I told ye I would. And I will come for you again and again, beyond life and beyond death, until there’s nothing left of me.”

The room opened like a wound then, the fabric of the 20th century fraying at its edges. Jamie spoke faster now, feeling the tug of his earthly body – faraway somewhere, lying asleep and desolate in a cave.

“Blood of my blood,” he started, grasping for straws and footholds. Anything to bring her to him. “Bone of my bone…”

Claire jumped. “Jamie?” she breathed in disbelief.

“I give ye my body…”

“ _Jamie_.”

His name, recited like Scripture – no longer a question, but a summons. It pulled him forth, mooring Jamie against the rushing current of time.

“Aye,” he said, an echo in the night. Claire sank to the floor, noticing threads of red and auburn shimmering in the darkness. Brianna, still held against her, shrieked and struggled towards the twinkling spectre.

“Jamie” _,_ Claire repeated, the sweetest taste on her tongue. She saw the shifting of his shadow, bending down beside her.

“Tell me it’s you,” she begged softly. “Tell me this isn’t a dream.”

“It’s me, Sassenach.” Amber eyes bore into his soul, the force of her gaze forging chains of iron, blood, and bone between them. Recognition and acknowledgement found at last.

Claire reached out to stroke the air, fragments of his face flickering like fireflies against her fingers.

“I’m not dreaming,” she sighed. “I can see you. I can – feel you.” Tears flowed freely now, each one a prayer released and granted as they spilled upon her cheeks. “But does this mean –”

“No.” Jamie replied, anticipating the question. “I’m no’ dead. But I’ve no time to explain it, either.”

He could feel himself drifting with each passing minute.

“You can't leave me,” Claire cried quietly. “Not again. Not so soon.”

Their thoughts turned to the memory of their final moments together. Years ago now and in a different place. A cabin on the moor and a last-minute joining of body and soul, heartache digging their claws into wrists and ankles.

“I canna stay here,  _mo nighean donn_ , but I will never leave ye. For I carry your heart wi’ me always, just as ye carry mine.”

His lips brushed her palm, a warm breath against the white half-moon that marked her his forever. Jamie clung to Claire tightly, their daughter cradled in the space between past and present.

“Don’t be afraid,” Jamie whispered. “It’s the three of us now.”

**~**

Outside an owl’s coo rang loudly through the night. Perched on a branch of the birch tree, he looked into the house on Burley Street and found a most peculiar scene:

A woman, tear-streaked and tender, with a babe held to her breast – and a hand clutching the empty air.


End file.
